Posts Tagged 'Diversity'

During the NewCo Boulder festival, web development agency Quick Left gave a talk about diversity and inclusion in the workplace. The panelists shared stories of their experiences around diversity—good and bad—and gave advice on what can be done to make workplaces more inclusive. It was one of the best talks I heard all year.

After much discussion, both philosophical and tactical, an audience member expressed concern about counter-discrimination. Would the time come when he would be overlooked for a job because he was not a diversity candidate?

This is not the first time this has been brought up in diversity discussions, and he was expressing what many (perhaps too many) straight white males think when diversity is discussed. To the credit of Gerry Valentine, one of the panelists, he did not chastise the audience member, and instead commended him for his bravery. The man who asked the question gave voice to a common concern that is often thought, but rarely brought up. The panelists at NewCo Boulder handled it very well, pointing out that no one wants a job just based on their gender, skin color, sexual preference, or anything other than their ability to execute on the job. And, collectively, we want to create a world where everyone has the opportunity to compete for jobs on equal ground.

I was truly moved by the entire session, but found myself upset that even at the close of 2015 we are still answering questions about counter-discrimination. When Gerry commended the question for its bravery, I first wondered if he was being glib. But knowing Gerry, I was certain he was serious about his comment. Upon further reflection, I realized what's interesting about this "pale and male" pushback is that it comes from a place of fear. A fear of discrimination is at the root of the question when someone asks, "As a white male, am I going to get passed over for a job because this company wants to hire for diversity?"

Following Gerry's example, it's OK to acknowledge that fear. It’s OK to point out that white men don’t want to live in a world where they are discriminated against, even subtly. While that is a valid fear, for the straight white male candidate, it is only a fear of a potential future. If they can imagine potential discrimination, can they acknowledge that the reality of our world today: anyone who isn’t a straight white male does experience this as real fear. Imagine walking into a job interview having to first overcome the things about you that you cannot control (gender, skin color, sexual orientation, physical handicap, economic background, country of origin, etc.) just to get to a level playing field with the other candidates. If you don't want this for yourself, you certainly wouldn't want it for anyone else.

In startups, we love to talk about unfair advantage, but when it comes to hiring, the only unfair advantages should be skills and experience. What the movement for inclusion and diversity is about—and what we should be striving for—is a world where we all compete equally. If it is a brave thing to express your fear publicly, it is braver still to acknowledge the reality of the situation and work to rectify it.

One of the things I love about the startup community is that once we identify a problem, we move forward to solve it in as many ways possible. The path to inclusion in the workplace doesn't have to be a pendulum that oscillates between two extremes—discrimination and counter-discrimination—before settling down in the middle. Pendulums are a relic of the industrial era. In the digital era, we can choose our target, set our standards, and move forward as a community to achieve them. As you build your startup, build inclusion in your workplace from day one.

Now that I've had about twelve years of work experience, I'm at a point in my life where I can't really claim to be "young" or "inexperienced" anymore. Throughout my professional career, I've been exposed to many different types of work environments, and I must say that never have I encountered as diverse a work force as the one I work with now at SoftLayer *ndash; everything from family background to hobbies.

Since my first day at SoftLayer, I've been amazed to learn about all the different places my coworkers have come from. To name a few that stood out and to give you an idea of how diverse our team is, I have colleagues that are from Madagascar, Sri Lanka, El Salvador, Korea, Japan, and even "Texas." It is fascinating to learn more about other cultures from them, and because we work together every day, I have a lot of great opportunities to do so.

To take this concept of diversity even further, as I got to know my coworkers more, I soon realized that our differences extended significantly beyond nationality since we have such varied personal hobbies and interests from all walks of life. I've gotten to know individuals that are into acting for short films, piloting airplanes, live-action role playing, skateboarding, cooking, car drifting, and barbecuing. You may not find this unusual if you've have encountered people with similar interests at some point in your lives, but to have them all in a single workplace is pretty incredible to me.

Despite all these differences in nationality and personal interests, we all share the same passion for computer hardware and software that is an integral part of the business services that SoftLayer offers. We could talk for hours on end about the different technologies, and even with all of our differences, SoftLayer's unified, inviting corporate culture makes it easy for us to share a passion for excellent customer support. If you talk to Lance, you'll hear him say that the customer experience is the only thing that matters to him, and when your CEO lives and breathes that mantra, it's easy for everyone to follow.

When I first heard about the plans to expand overseas into Amsterdam and Singapore, I was a little nervous at the challenge, but when I started to think about it, our business model has always involved employing diverse talents with a common goal that could be implemented essentially anywhere in the world with little difficulty.

SoftLayer has become a great melting pot of technical staff, and because new employees are rapidly assimilated into the team, their unique interests and personalities immediately become a part of the far-reaching (and growing) landscape of SoftLayer diversity.

Want to bring some of your diversity to our team? Right now we have 50+ open positions in almost every department of the company and in every location. Just promise when you join our team that you'll send me a message to introduce yourself!

The Northeastern part of the United States saw two natural disasters within the span of five days of each other. The first was in the Washington, D.C. area: A 5.8 earthquake on August 23, 2011. On August 28, Hurricane Irene made her way up the east coast, leaving nearly 5.5 million people without power. We do everything we can to prepare our facilities for natural disasters (generator power backup, staffing, redundant bandwidth links and providers, etc.), and given the recent events, now might be a good time to start thinking about how your servers respond when something out of the ordinary happens ... Let's look at two relatively easy ways you can set your business up to scale and recover.

The first option you may consider would be to set up a multi-tiered environment by deploying multiple servers in various geographical locations. Your servers in each location could be accessed via load balancing or round robin DNS. In this kind of high-availability environment, your servers could handle the incoming requests more quickly with the load being split amongst the multiple data centers. The failover would be just a few seconds should you lose connectivity to one of the locations.

The second option to consider would be the private image repository for our CloudLayer Computing. This options allows you to save a private image template in different data centers, each ready for quick deployment without having to install and configure the same operating system and applications. Should you need additional resources or lose connectivity to your instance in one facility, you can deploy the saved image in another facility. The failover time would be only in the provisioning process of the Computer Instance ... which doesn't take too long.

Scalability makes sense no matter what situation you may be facing – from natural disaster to hitting the front page of Reddit. If you have any questions about these scalability options, "Click to Chat" on our site or give us a call and a sales rep can help you get prepared. Your infrastructure may have come through these recent events unscathed, but don't let that lull you into a false sense of security. The "It's better to be safe than sorry" cliche is a cliche for a reason: It's worth saying often.

The DesktopLayer from CyberlinkASP

Hosted virtual desktops – SoftLayer style.

In early 2006, we were introduced to SoftLayer. In 2007, they brought us StorageLayer, and in 2009, CloudLayer. Each of those solutions met a different kind of need in the Application Service Provider (ASP) world, and by integrating those platforms into our offering, DesktopLayer was born: The on-demand anytime, anywhere virtual desktop hosted on SoftLayer and powered by CyberlinkASP.

CyberlinkASP was originally established to instantly web-enable software applications that were not online in the past. Starting off as a Citrix integration firm in the early days, we were approached by multiple independent software vendors asking us to host, manage and deliver their applications from a centralized database platform to their users across multiple geographic locations. With the robust capabilities of Citrix, we were able to revolutionize application delivery and management for several ISV's.

Over time, more ISV's starting showing up at our doorstep, and application delivery was becoming a bigger and bigger piece of our business. Our ability to provision users on a specific platform in minutes, delete them in minutes, perform updates and maintain hundreds of customers and thousands of users all at one time from a centralized platform was very attractive.

Our users began asking us, "Is it possible to put our payroll app on this platform too?" "What about Exchange and Office?" They loved the convenience of not managing the DBs for individual applications, and they obviously wanted more. Instead of providing one-off solutions for individual applications, we built the DesktopLayer, a hosted environment for virtual desktops.

We deliver a seamless and integrated user experience utilizing SoftLayer, Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop. When our users log in they see the same screen, the same applications and the same performance they received on their local machine. The Citrix experience takes over the entire desktop, and the look and feel is indistinguishable. It's exactly what they are accustomed to.

Our services always include the Microsoft suite (Exchange, Office, Sharepoint) and is available on any device, from your PC to your Mac to your iPad. To meet the needs of our customers, we also integrate all 3rd party apps and non-Microsoft software into the virtual desktop – if our customers are using Peachtree or Quickbooks for accounting and Kronos for HR, they are all seamlessly published to the users who access them, and unavailable to those that do not.

We hang our hat on our unique ability to tie all of a company's applications into one centralized user experience and support it. Our Dallas-based call center is staffed with a team of knowledgeable engineers who are always ready to help troubleshoot and can add/delete and customize new users in minutes. We take care of everything ... When someone needs help setting up a printer or they bought a new scanner, they call our helpdesk and we take it from there. Users can call us directly for support and leave the in-house IT team to focus on other areas, not desktop management.

With the revolution of cloud computing, many enterprises are trending toward the eradication of physical infrastructure in their IT environments. Every day, we see more and more demand from IT managers who want us to assume the day-to-day management of their end user's entire desktop, and over the past few years, the application stack that we deliver to each of our end users has grown significantly.

As Citrix would say "the virtual desktop revolution is here." The days of having to literally touch hundreds of devices at users' workstations are over. Servers in the back closet are gone. End users have become much more unique and mobile ... They want the same access, performance and capabilities regardless of geography. That's what we provide. DesktopLayer, with instant computing resources available from SoftLayer, is the future.

I remember someone telling me in 2006 that it was time for the data center to "grow up". It has. We now have hundreds of SMB clients and thousands of virtual desktops in the field today, and we love having a chance to share a little about how we see the IT landscape evolving. Thanks to our friends at SoftLayer, we get to tell that story and boast a little about what we're up to!

This guest blog series highlights companies in SoftLayer's Technology Partners Marketplace. These Partners have built their businesses on the SoftLayer Platform, and we're excited for them to tell their stories. New Partners will be added to the Marketplace each month, so stay tuned for many more come.